Thursday, January 08, 2009

The Three-Fold Psyche: Thoughts on Steiner, Strieber, and Those Darn Gray Aliens

From an email to a fellow researcher, Louis, also writing about Whitley Strieber at that time (mid 2008).

I would like to suggest that, in your investigations into these apparently “external” matters, you always consider how they reflect and thereby draw attention to an internal order or dynamic at work.

I have also been working hard to apply this same method to the teachings of Steiner, regarding Ahriman, Lucifer and Christ, and tho I can’t share this with you just yet, I will say that I think it is a key to your own explorations also.

The “external” trinity is this: Ahriman, Lucifer, and Christ. All are aspects of Man, internally experienced as mind, heart, and soul—or intellect, feeling/imagination, and will.

It’s clear when we speak of the inner trinity that there is no clear dividing line between these functions. Intellect overlaps with feeling and imagination, and feeling-imagination is, you might say, the dormant or passive side of will. Likewise, the fusion of mind with heart consciousness leads to an awareness of Soul.

So it stands to reason that the same “overlap” applies to the apparent “external” “entities’ of Ahriman, Lucifer and Christ. Each is a shadow or a forerunner of the next, which is a more evolved or complete expression, you might say, of what comes “before” it.

The key is to bring them into harmony as a triangle of forces, i.e., a single force with three aspects: negative, positive, and—for lack of a better word—“transcendent.” This can only come about, however, by first aligning the forces, as separate functions within us, with the Impersonal, while simultaneously “grounding” or earthing the Archetypal forces (entities) in the personal, i.e., humanizing them, allowing them access to our normal awareness, thereby transforming it.

I would say that both Pinchbeck and Strieber, in their different ways, are stuck in the Ahrimanic realm, i.e., that of intellect. They have so far failed to align their hearts, their imaginations, with the Impersonal (Lucifer). What this means is that they have expanded their intellects to encompass the Imaginal phenomena of “aliens,” and such like, but are unable—save intellectually—to take their understanding into the realm of imagination and will.

This then determines the actual nature of the “beings” which they experience. So it’s not that these beings are Ahrimanic, but that this is the only aspect of them that is being experienced. And even if Strieber can conceptualize, and so speak about, the other two aspects, his Knowing is incomplete. Although Strieber is describing Lucifer (heart) and Christ (soul) qualities of the experience, he isn’t really communicating it, because he isn’t able to integrate his various understandings at a personal level.

There are in fact two trinities, making a total of nine combinations:

Mind, Heart, Soul is combined with the trinity of personal, Impersonal, and Archetypal: so you have personal mind, Impersonal Mind, Archetypal Mind, and so on, making nine aspects in all, which need to be integrated into a single, geometric picture of the interaction between Self and Other.

You may recall Strieber became obsessed with nine knocks which he heard, and the idea that the Visitors communicated their lessons according to the number 9, the ennead.

>“They [the visitors] are physically real. They also function on a non-physical level, and this may be their primary reality.”

You may ask where the Body comes into all this. I suspect the body—which potentially houses all three aspects of Mind, Heart, and Soul, and of personal, Impersonal and Archetypal being, is like the page upon which these forms and structures are drawn, the foundation upon which they are built. Potentially, when the Body is fully integrated into these forces, or vice versa, perhaps it will become the fourth aspect, and so create a quaternary? If so, then there is an aspect of being beyond the Archetypal also, so eventually the complete sequence will be 4 X 4, with 16 aspects in total.

But for now the Body is as it were “asleep,” a dumb, brute animal, ruled by Ahriman and so under the dominion of Death and not Life.

Is this why the Visitors cannot materialize physically without being “corrupted” (trapped, limited, distorted) in the process?

>“They [the visitors] have the ability to enter the mind and affect thought, and can accomplish amazing feats with this skill.”

Because the mind/intellect is the only part which we have begun to integrate—as a species—with the realms of Impersonal and Archetypal?

>"We may be part of a triad that includes the visitors. They may be the aggressive force, entering us, enforcing our passivity, seeking to draw from the relationship some new creation."

This is a complex area. Since it seems we are already somehow entwined with the Visitors (i.e., they are an aspect of our Totality, and we of theirs), I think perhaps the whole hybrid “reptilian babies’ view of this interface may be a case of a too literal (intellectual), and hence lmited, grasping of Imaginal reality.

>The visitors, I think, are a very potent “force,” and, like us, possess both a negative and a positive side. Terrifying alien abductions are a good example of positive (or dark side) visitor activity, while crop circles are a good example of positive visitor activity. The former, I think, is an Ahrimanic influence. As for the latter, I’m not entirely sure – perhaps Lucifer.

I note your curious typo in which you have two positives and no negative! Are you in denial of your Shadow, Louis? ; )

>The visitors have something we need, and we have something they need. Our evolution depends on them, and vice versa. But, because they function primarily on a non-physical level, and we function primarily on a physical level, we are unable to form a proper relationship with each other. Through writing about the visitors, and helping to convince humanity of their existence, Strieber – who is a shaman/medium – is assisting their entry into our dimension. He has been chosen, in other words, as a “focus” through whom the visitors can make a full physical manifestation on this plane (the physical plane).

Once again, the intellect is the bridge. As it is being absorbed into the Impersonal and Archetypal realms, our task then becomes to bring these forces down into the personal—hence abductions, crop circles, and so forth. Then, in order to deal with these intellectually terrifying, or at least baffling (mind-destroying), experiences, we need to open our hearts and imaginations to the Impersonal, and repeat the whole process at the next level; at the end of which, we will have fused the negative-positive of mind/heart, and be ready to activate our wills and have full “knowledge and conversation” of the Angel or Other, as the Totality of our own personal/Impersonal/Archetypal Selves.

>But, in order to do this correctly, and “take the species to a whole new level,” Strieber must “balance between dark and light…”

Integrate the shadow into the light, the personal into the Impersonal.

>What “comes through” the medium largely depends on the medium’s own character, as well as their ability to “filter” this information.

Which is itself determined by the degree to which the medium has “surrendered” his or her personal self to the higher forces that wish to communicate through them. Only by essentially becoming one with these forces (and beings) can we relay a pure communication, because otherwise there will always be separation between subject and object, between message and medium. This allows the intellect, feelings, and personal will to interfere with (interpret) the transmission, and to shape and distort it to personal (though often unconscious) ends.

> For humanity to form a triad with the visitors – a balanced triad, that is (which results in the production of a fourth force) – Strieber needs to act as an effective (and discerning) medium…Actually, wait a second, this theory doesn’t make sense (which is why I need to work on it more).

It doesn’t make sense because: a) to be an effective medium Strieber must cease to be a medium at all and become the message; and b) WS is only one guy. Like Castaneda, he seems to be showing us more how the process can go wrong than how it needs to go.

10 comments:

An Unseen Friend
said...

The visitors, as you call them, are a disease. Their very presence is an assault upon the collective consciousness of the human species. Whatever 'gifts' they offer are nothing more than deceptive manipulation. They are creating a relationship that has the appearance of symbiosis but which is actually parasitical. It's idiotic to pretend that there is much 'mystery' in the phenomenon. The only thing that is consistent with the bug eyed demon fairies is EXPLOITATION. To say that you can attain some kind of spiritual epiphany by surrendering to the experience is about as useful as saying that you can achieve epiphany while you're being RAPED. Strieber has created an elaborate personal mythology to justify his victimization, to preserve the structural integrity of his ego in the face of a VICIOUS ASSAULT. His is an extremely destructive pathology. Its not sorcery, its masochism.

that's a very personal response, Unseen friend. You speak as one who KNOWS, which if so, can only ever extend to your own experience (of the grays, eg). John De Ruiter talks of how nothing that comes from without can harm us, but that it certainly can make us harm ourselves, by not being open to it, by shutting down, trying to escape into the Not-Is instead of surrendering to what IS.

If it allows for surrender, anything at all can be an epiphany, even rape.

And don't forget, even parasitical entities have their place in the Universe. Everything does. (Including emotionally rooted denial of this energetic fact!)

Doesn't "disease", of any kind, usually point to some kind of imbalance in our lives that is causing us to have symptoms that point to how to correct the imbalance? Many (if not most) physical diseases are caused by a lack of certain nutrients, so would it be fair to say that since many people experience the greys as a psychic disease, they might be missing some sort of psychic nutrient (or something like that)? There seems to be a very strong sense of fear and hatred in Unseen Friend's post (please note that I am not saying its wrong of him/her to feel that way), and also a very strong air of negative judgement of how WS handled what happened to him. Since hatred is a very strong bond, often caused by a thwarted desire for a more positive form of relationship, perhaps it would profit Unseen Friend to try loving the alien, just a little, and see what happens?

If we were cows, I wonder if we might think of humans as a “parasitic species.”

If you were a bug-eyed demon, I wonder if you could locate any period in the last 5000 years that could be described as being free of “exploitation.”

If I were Gaia, I suspect that I might think of all recent civilization as a “disease.”

—Here is a response that I wrote to “Joan of Art”, who had asked— in a comment on my essay “The Goddess as Active Listener”, (posted on 7/21 on Reality Sandwich)— “What is your relationship to extraterrestrials?” I wrote:

Revolution by night/ 6 questions about aliens

Hi Joan of Art,

Great to hear from you again. You have asked: “What is your relationship to extra-terrestrials?” Please, will you watch your language! The ones I know prefer the politically incorrect name of “aliens”, which they take to be a kind of interdimensional joke.

Who, you may ask, is the butt of this black humor? That is the never ending question. Perhaps the 8-armed egg of Moebius knows, but he/ she cannot be tempted to say much, and we humans seem to have lost our keys to the grammar of the once universal language.

Let me respond to your question with six questions of my own:

1) How “alien” are they, really, and is the shiver of uncanniness we feel a tribute to the closeness of our bond?

2) Why do “aliens” approach humans in the most intimate of settings, such as bedrooms, which they enter with no prior notice, almost as though some long standing relationship were in effect, of which their Earthly counterparts, only, remain unaware?

3) If they are exobiological, then why do they have such an interest in our bodies, which they violate with impunity, leaving only a few hieroglyphic scars, as we find that their zany transplants and their Fascist interventions often do more good than harm?

4) And how should we interpret this incestuous family drama: heads or tails, love match or Greek Tragedy?

5) Are they the servants and we the masters, now grown senile, on whose behalf they perform their initiatory rites?

6) Is our categorization of these presences as “aliens” a kind of magical act to avoid confronting the full fear and wonder of the dimension that they come from, the home that we left some indeterminate time ago, on which a door slammed shut?

Just asking!

See also my response to “rodomontade”, “Our stories return from the world of light to haunt us”, posted below. In it, you will see that I frame this issue in an open-ended way; the same experience of being carried out of the solar system by a tornado might be interpreted as just a state of heightened energy, a shamanic initiation, an archetypal dream, an ecstatic flight, or an alien abduction.

Here is an excerpt that deals with the aftermath of this experience:

“A revolution had occurred by night. My family, friends, and countrymen were unaware that a change in the narrative voice had removed the Earth from beneath them. For my own part, I felt seized and violated by my subjection to the small hands of the larger pattern. But then again, it would be easy to convey the wrong impression; the experience was one of equal ecstasy and fear.”

Here are several excerpts from my comments on Gary Lachman’s “Archangels of Our Darker Natures” (Reality Sandwich 11/25). In this essay, Lachman explores the connections between Mircea Eliade and the Fascist Right, and I remark on how his vision—as well as that of Evola, Serrano, Guenon, and other such impressive writers—was corrupted by a naïve and arrogant relationship to “The Shadow.”

I would suggest that our interactions with “The Shadow” and “The Alien” should be similar, and must be based on a sense of unconditional openness, on a reckless joy; instead of on the projection of our fears. It is we who are predestined to be messengers, not they, who risk less than their all. An age ago, it is we who had volunteered to jump head-first into Death, but some trauma has obscured the confidence that should accompany this role.

—From “The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Annihilation” (last third):

The problem is that “The Shadow” does not look like “The Shadow”; it looks like the external world. So long as one sees oneself as separate from the evil to be overcome, or one’s slightly more articulate ignorance as somehow privileged by the Absolute, then there is no real hope for a life-changing confrontation with the Other.

For the past 20 or so years, I have also experienced a sense of worlds upon worlds breaking open; of the geometry behind History just about to be revealed; of a lost world being wrestled from my grasp, like an object upon waking from a dream; of some trauma that contaminates all attempts at perfect vision. I can certainly understand the need to test one’s energies against events, or to find some external cause that would give form to one’s depth of intuition. Space/ Time is an obstacle—to be removed; and any form of action must be better than no action at all. Except when it is not.

To the temptation to impregnate politics with myth, my attitude has been a prophylactic “Just say no.” Simultaneously, I would caution: respect the urge if not the act; the urge to revolt against Space/ Time is not different from the one that fuels each creative breakthrough.

Blake, for example, would be an artist who gave positive expression to this same world-conquering impulse. Sealed within the althanor of his transformation, he did not depart from the realm of symbolic action; all contraries met within one energetic body.

The fire of Prometheus, yes; the arrogance of the Archons, no. Quite strangely, the same vision can prompt results that are diametrically opposed. Apocalyptic violence escorts the dream of the Satya Yuga. Ecstasy guides the magus through each twist and turn of the labyrinth, and then finally out through the exit—into farce.

If, as some proponents of the occult right contend, an experience of primordial wholeness can be gained through the act of Tantric intercourse—whether with a partner, or through the opening of the microcosmic orbit, thus reintegrating the root and crown chakras and subverting the horizontal projection of duality—then Eliade, Evola, Serrano, Guenon and their like, must, when all is said and done, be regarded as a group of premature ejaculators.

As the maxim says, “In my patience is my soul.”

The lost world that imagines us does not need to be created; and we, who are not other than its shadow, must learn how to approach it through the prism of our fear, whose force-fields we must navigate. “The Shadow” that for millennia has haunted us, now a guide, will again demonstrate his/her ability to steer. A hair’s breadth of a difference separates discovery from destruction., Hidden in plain sight, the future/ past, already, is as perfect as it needs to be, and our post-traumatic stress only serves to cloud the issue.

—In response to which, “Kelleil” asked:

“Simply please…How is the Shadow able to guide now, as in comparison to the past? What accounts for the PTSD? As we are in the Kali Yuga, how is such progress possible and is that accounting for a new paradigm, a fundamental shift in the fabric of our reality?"

—I responded as follows:

The ghosts of Antarctica and the paradox of the guide

Hi kelleil,

You wrote, “How is the Shadow able to guide now, as in comparison to the past?”

—After asking for simplicity, you have certainly posed a very complex question! Let’s see. On the simplest level, I would say that the relationship between the shadow and the guide is a mystery, one that each day I continue to explore. Perhaps this is not informative.

On a somewhat more complex level, I would argue, based first and foremost on my own experience, that the shadow, the double, the inner teacher, and the preexistent guide are all aspects of one single presence; its energy is explosive, and it has the power to obliterate or to transform what it touches.

Contracted, it appears to be one’s enemy; expanded, it appears to be one’s friend. Quite strangely, it is neither of the above. If its agenda overlaps, in many ways and at certain times, with our own, it would nonetheless be a mistake, on this side of the experience of death, to jump to any conclusions about which side of the millennial war we are on. Luck overtakes us; but perhaps we are being set up for the kill.

On one level, each of us is irreducibly special; we have each come with a one of a kind gift. On a different level, we are all of us anonymous. We are many, like the dead, who must somehow learn to navigate by scent.

Like the alien doctors who invade our dreams, where, having beamed us out of one space but not quite to the next, with wide eyes they conduct their nonsensical dissections; so too, there is a shadow who conducts obscure experiments on our fears. He is the guardian of non-duality. Through the integration of his lower energies we gain access to his higher functions. Bit by bit, the shadow reveals his shared identity with the guide.

Ascending through the worlds, lightning flashes between the connections that join each part to the All. The web is infinite, and our vision correspondingly grows. At the same time, the key players in the drama can be counted on one hand.

Has the shadow become more user-friendly? No. Whether now, or 2,000 or 10,000 years ago, the shared identity of the shadow and the guide has always presented us with an ultimatum. “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.” “Live free, and/ or die.” True ecstasy necessitates the removal of one’s skin. The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge have never been two different trees.

Our guardians lie; it is the serpent who instructs us.

As always, we must begin by reintroducing the ego to the shadow—the most immediate one—which, however strong, is only as large as one’s subconscious. Its contents are as unique as DNA. (Or so some think, and here we will leave out several steps in our exploration.)

But beyond the individual shadow there is also a collective shadow, upon which some trauma has prevented us from acting; it is this shadow that is only just coming into focus. Mad geniuses impregnate the technology of the One.

New/ Old Maxims, and Some Thoughts on the Survival of an Out-of-Body Ordeal

“Parasites” who live in glass houses—should probably avoid throwing the first stone.

If I had just indulged in a “VISCIOUS ASSAULT” against the Fairies, I would, of necessity, be tempted to describe them as a race of “bug-eyed demons”; even when I had been so rude as to interpret an initiation as a “rape.”

Fear not the Killer Klown; as laughter is the best medicine for the dead.

Let no passive/ aggressive “victim” look a gift horse in the mouth, lest he be handed his head on a metaphysical platter. For he has broken the law that governs that glad welcoming of the Guest.

—All teasing aside; I was playing around with the ideas in your comment about aliens, and came up with this short prose poem:

Swing Time with the Grays; Some Notes Regarding the Destruction of All Doctors

To revise the Hippocratic Oath, they have come from Zeta Reticuli to the Earth. “Kill or be killed.” “Everything must go!” Fear infiltrates the bio-energy of their “victim.” He shrugs, as his hair stands on end.

“It is important to remove the coiled “genius” from one’s butt”, he thinks, “however mad that “genius” might appear. He is the first love of the Morning Star; the free-associative wound that heals. He is Beauty, the berserk avenger. His head has, through the centuries, grown; at last getting stuck in the channel between worlds.

When, having shattered the projection that is Space, I will make the Inner as the Outer, and the Male as the Female, it is likely that I will die; at that point I will prove impervious to attack.”

“For your own good, we must stage an intervention”, say the Grays. “This may hurt a bit when you scream.”—Such is their bedside manner. Quite oddly, the treatment does not go according to the plan. “You are only a piece of experimental livestock”, say the Grays. “You must listen to the voice inside your head. No, not that voice! That voice is bad. How many times have we told you: ‘Get with the Program.’”

But yet again, the “genius” is drunk on his own breath; as violent as a god. “Between two armies, all of Time has stopped. On the field of Kurukshetra, I will raise my rat-banner high!” he shouts. Somewhere around Ground Zero he has lost his supernatural weapon.

Let the one hand not know what the other hand is doing. Let all be done as the “genius” has instructed. What he says; goes. “The Great War has been over for the past 12,000 years. News of the lifting of Earth’s quarantine travels slowly; as slowly as a beam of light.” His supernatural weapon is the guarantee of his words; who can say any different?

A flash of energy destroys each alternate version of the story. No numbers beyond 10 exist, and no populations tilt as the South trades places with the North. Again, the Primordial Male/ Female Body is transparent.

No remnant is left of an “opposing force.” There is no “other side.” No fleets of glass houses rise above the surface of the ocean, which swallows all. A ringing silence now encrypts his every action. It is for this weapon, also, that the alien doctors search. The “rectal probe” is a metaphor; and a hackneyed one, however inter-dimensional in its scope.